I've very a lot of searching on Google and can not find the answer to this question.

We have Enterprise Magento and are using SOLR. We would like to select a group of products and put them at the top of the search results when they are returned by SOLR. We would use this for clearance products, etc.

My idea was to put the items in to a special non-display category on the backend and to somehow configure SOLR to put a greater weighting on these products for the search results. But I can not see how to do this. I can only see how to weight product attributes.

instead of putting products to a category, your can just create an attribute (like "Priority") and assign greater value for all of your "clearance" products. And for solr configure this attribute as the most foreground.
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Slayer BirdenNov 19 '12 at 13:21